"Dear Macy Gray,
You report on your Facebook page that you are receiving “a lot of letters from activists urging/begging me to boycott by NOT performing in protest of Apartheid against the Palestinians.” And you say that you “don’t know how my NOT going changes anything.” The answer is that the cultural boycott of Israel is having the same effect on Israel as the cultural boycott of Apartheid South Africa once had in delegitimizing the crime of Apartheid there.
Activists, including a group of courageous Israeli activists, Boycott from Within, are urging you not to go because the effect of your appearing in Tel Aviv will be to send a strong message to Israelis that what they are doing to Palestine is acceptable. You would be saying that their state and its policies, which systematically discriminate against Palestinians in Israel and in the Occupied Territories and Gaza, are normal and that Israel is just one democracy among others.
To go to Tel Aviv is to actively lend your support to Israel’s discriminatory and illegal occupation of Palestine, which has been recognized as a form of apartheid by statesmen like Jimmy Carter and Bishop Desmond Tutu, by numerous human rights groups including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, and by millions of ordinary citizens worldwide."
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